Economical supercomputing thru smartphone crowd computing: An assessment of opportunities, benefits, deterrents, and applications from India's perspective

Buying and maintaining supercomputers are exceedingly costly affairs. In a country like India, not many organisations can afford to have one, due to which many compute-intensive works and research remain undone. On the other hand, the revolution of smartphones has brought unforeseen computing power to our fingertips. Today's smartphones can deliver equivalent or even better performance than supercomputers of yesteryears. We argue that the collective computing power of these mighty smartphones, much like of desktop grid computing, can provide us the computing power of potentially equivalent to a modern supercomputer without paying out much. We have endorsed our assessment with the statistics of smartphone's computing potential and user development of smartphones in India. Some obvious restraining issues, as well the future promises to come over them, have been discussed. Some specific application areas in Indian perspective have been broached also.